Through our agent at St. Petersburg we were kept informed of the movements of our rivals. Our agent in San Francisco was instructed to inform me, by cable, as to what steamer the Count chartered, her speed and equipment. Meanwhile I was busy looking up a vessel, and after great difficulty, secured the Russian steamer _Progress_, Captain Gunderson. I provisioned her for six months, filled her up with coal enough for five months' steaming, and by June 3 everything was ready. The previous day I had received a cablegram from San Francisco, stating that the rival expedition, under the management of Count Bogdanovitch and George D. Roberts, an American mining engineer, would sail from that port on June 6. Their speed was ten knots, and they would stop at Nome and one or two other United States ports. They were in no hurry, and were entirely in ignorance of our existence. Their boat was the _Samoa_, a Puget Sound lumber vessel. We could make eleven knots an hour, and had a slightly shorter route to follow than they. Furthermore, _we knew_, and they did not. We learned that at Plover Bay, on the Russian side, they were to meet a Russian gun-boat named the _Yakut_, which would help to drive away any American miners who might surreptitiously have opened up claims on the Siberian side. Of these rumor said that there were some three thousand. At five o'clock in the afternoon of June 3 we turned our prow seaward, but, after going a hundred yards, a bolt gave way in the engine, and we had to lay up for repairs. I chafed at the enforced delay, but the next morning we were off. Before we had cleared the entrance of the long, winding bay, we ran into a heavy fog-bank, and, after feeling our way along for a while, we were obliged to drop anchor again. When the fog lifted we found that we had passed within a hundred yards of a rocky promontory, and had escaped only by good luck. It was not till the next day that we reached the open sea, and six days later we were riding at anchor in the harbor of Petropaulovsk. At that point I put off four men to open up a copper vein that I had located the first time I had passed that way. After having filled our water-tanks again, we pushed toward the north. In Bering Sea we found it still cold and foggy, but we kept the vessel up to her eleven knots, even at the risk of suddenly encountering ice. By keeping a sharp lookout and frequently taking the temperature of the water, we lessened the danger as much as possible.